Thief à la Femme

A recent college graduate, Rayla Rousseau has been leading a double life that’s given her life extraordinary meaning. Trained from the time she was seven by her grandmother to become the irrepressible thief she is, Rayla has worked for a secret sisterhood since her 13th birthday. In addition, Rayla’s maintained a solo thieving career since she turned 18. Now at 22, she’s a full-fledged high-end thief who steals from the vile, contemptible, and entitled wealthy, taking down real bad guys and keeping a fair amount of the spoils for her trouble.

Rayla Rousseau is all about using her significant talents and training to dole out vigilante justice for victims of real criminals—despicable, low-life crooks with no conscience or honor—who take advantage of the poor and defenseless. Nevertheless, she is a thief…and an infamous one at that: Thief à la Femme.

As a formidable high-end thief in good standing in her community of renegades, Rayla Rousseau—aka Thief à la Femme and one of the 12 all-female Robins of the Hood—has complete knowledge of the heisting challenge known in her world as simply The Triple Crown. For one thing, she knows it’s not a challenge high-end thieves with any morals would consider perpetrating.

He knows she’s a thief. She knows he’s a fed. they married each other anyway. And now that the honeymoon’s over, things are about to get interesting.

Justice is a word with which Master Thief Rayla Rousseau is very familiar. After all, as Thief à la Femme and one of the fourteen members of the all-female thieving crew known universally as Robins of the Hood, procuring justice for those who can’t get it through legal means is what she does. So, when one of the Robins’ own discovers the Arsenault Museum has stolen her ancestors’ artwork, the sisterhood is all over it. Unfortunately, the museum’s security has the lady thieves baffled—a first for the four-decades-old Robins.

On an otherwise typical Sunday night, infamous Thief à la Femme Rayla Rousseau-Keltry and her FBI husband have the grave misfortune of finding their across-the-hall neighbor shot to death in his condo. A diamond simulant—in truth, a superb specimen of an extraordinarily large natural moissanite gem—is perched near the fingers of his lifeless, outstretched hand. Without a shred of doubt the man has been murdered, the unlikely but eminently successful crime-solving duo of vigilante thief and federal agent set out to find answers. But the more they dig, the more questions they unearth.